DSL Implementation Using Staging and Monads

The impact of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) on software design is considerable. They allow programs to be more concise than equivalent programs written in a high-level programming languages. They relieve programmers from making decisions about data-structure and algorithm design, and thus allows solutions to be constructed quickly. Because DSL's are at a higher level of abstraction they are easier to maintain and reason about than equivalent programs written in a high-level language, and perhaps most importantly they can be written by domain experts rather than programmers.

The problem is that DSL implementation is costly and prone to errors, and that high level approaches to DSL implementation often produce inefficient systems. By using two new programming language mechanisms, program staging and monadic abstraction, we can lower the cost of DSL implementations by allowing reuse at many levels. These mechanisms provide the expressive power that allows the construction of many compiler components as reusable libraries, provide a direct link between the semantics and the low-level implementation, and provide the structure necessary to reason about the implementation.